Tuesday, 9 May 2017

The dynamics of the UK housing market have become increasingly topical following its role in the financial crisis of 2008. This study analyses the ripple effect across the UK’s regional housing market covering different housing types, whilst also incorporating any reverse effects back to the origin in London. This effect refers to the rippling out of changes in house prices in London to the surrounding regions and potentially also then reversing the ripple back to London. This ripple effect is important to the UK housing market as a whole, as movements in house prices usually originate in London, and recently London’s house prices have risen substantially after capital inflows from overseas were directed at the capital’s housing market. This has made the London market more volatile and thus more risky for investment purposes, but it is important to determine how this volatility in London could affect the rest of the UK housing market.

The 2008 financial crisis initially started in the housing market when assets backed by the sub-prime housing sector collapsed in price, undermining the solvency of the international banking sector. As a result all central banks now monitor the relationship between financial stability and the housing market more closely, especially through macroprudential policies which are specifically targeted at housing, such as the loan to house value ratios. This also requires some idea about how house prices are likely to evolve over the near future, which is why the understanding of house price dynamics and the ripple effect have become so important.

House prices across types
and regions

We can see in the Figure that the three types of house prices tend to move together, but there are differences. In particular in the period between 1990 and 2008, old and modern house prices caught up the new house prices. The Figure also shows the trend in old prices as we move north from London. Again there are similarities between the curves, but also substantial differences. For example, as we move northwards, and compared to London, the decline in prices in the early 1990s tended to be delayed and more muted, but the slowdown was then more prolonged. This gives plausibility to the hypothesis that shocks emanate in London and then spread out through the country. But our analysis suggests it is not that simple. Firstly, if there is some shock in another part of the country, we would anticipate it also rippling outwards including towards London and the South East. But secondly for the shock that does begin in London, as it ripples outwards so there will also be a recursive ripple back to London itself. The analogy can be made to a stone which is thrown into a pool of water. Waves will ripple outwards, but once they meet an obstacle they will begin to ripple back again.

This is complex enough, but our analysis, and this is one of its main contributions to the literature, suggests it is more complex still. It is as if there are three interconnected pools of water, with ripples from one impacting on the other two. A regional shock to new house prices will impact mostly on new prices in neighbouring regions and thence their neighbours. But there will also be some interaction between old, and in particular, modern house prices, both in the same region and neighbouring ones. A similar analysis applies to shocks to old and modern house prices.

Thus, a positive shock to new houses in London and Outer Metropolitan, will first impact on the South East and thence on the South West, the West and East Midlands and East Anglia. There will then be further knock on effects on e.g. the North West, all with differing speeds. Initially the largest impacts will be on other house types in London and new houses in adjacent regions. But the impact will eventually spread across all house types and regions. There will then be ripples, or echoes, back, from these regions to new, and other, house types in London. Hence the ripple acts recursively on at least two dimensions, firstly the spatial dimension and secondly the house vintage dimension. In effect there are multi-dimensional recursive ripples between different house types both within the same region and between regions.

There are lessons for policy makers in this. For example, if they introduce a policy which impacts on new houses, either across the UK or in a single region. Then there will be repercussions across all regions and all house types and it will take several years before the full effects have worked their way through the system. Policy makers should be aware of these repercussions and not just focus their attention on the new housing market or one particular region.

Thursday, 4 May 2017

Last month The Guardian newspaper ran an article entitled
‘How
Punk Changed Cities – and Vice Versa’. The article, while focusing
upon Punk music from the mid-1970s until the present, expands the idea of Punk
beyond the riffs of Suburban
Disease, Crass and the like,
to include a wealth of socio-cultural and political activities that make up
what has been termed D.I.Y. Counterculture. One such activity is setting up and
running ‘autonomy centres’. Sometimes referred to as social centres, these
D.I.Y. spaces are nodal points of creativity for this decentralised and diverse
scene. (I
use the term scene to capture a range of cultural tropes that link this
collection of groups and individuals).According to
the Guardian article, these centres are beginning to emerge as important places
for those whose politics stands in direct opposition to the extremes of the far-right
and the post-politics of the mainstream party system.

Autonomy centres have sprung up all over
Europe and the US over the last century or so and each centre has its own
story, very much related to the towns and cities they are found in. What
follows is a very short history and geography of European autonomy centres and
the autonomous scene in Europe more widely (for further insight see Chatterton, 2008
and Miguel Angel
Martinez Lopez, 2016).
Three waves of autonomy centre activity preceded the latest centres mentioned in
the Guardian article. Understanding the political dynamic within today’s
centres and what purpose they might serve is made easier through understanding
their history.

The first wave: socialism from below:

Today’s autonomy centres are the descendants
of a libertarian socialist current that utilized factory buildings, farmhouses,
churches, bars, and schools, and that stretches across Europe and back to the
early 20th century. Schmidt and van der Walt (2009: 185) write about the
Libertarian Athenaeums in the early years of last century “that existed in
every district and village of anarchist strength in Spain”. A type of anarchist
community centre, the Athenaeums, with their plays, picnics, dances, language
classes and more, were a critical component of the Spanish syndicalist unions.
During the same period, the Bourses du Travails (labour exchanges) in France
were used by revolutionary syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier (amongst others) as
centres of radical libertarian counterculture.

It is important to understand these
community spaces as one arm of a dual strategy employed by anarcho-syndicalists
in Spain and France, the other arm operating in the workplace. This dual
approach points towards recognition by anarchist-syndicalists of the importance
of struggles taking place outside the factories in the sphere of reproduction.
For Rocker (2004 [1937]) it was here the ongoing “educational work […] directed
toward the development of independent thought and action” would make “clear to
the workers the intrinsic connections among social problems”. While the content
and aims of each space differed in line with the political context of the
participants (consider for example the different terrains of struggle of the
industrial worker and the rural peasant), these early examples were very much
rooted in a culture of mass participatory democracy and community self-determination.
Alongside the strike, sabotage and the printed word, these early examples of
autonomy centres formed the weaponry of those no longer willing to accept their
lot under conditions set by an industrial bourgeoisie protected by the liberal
state.

The second wave: reclaiming the city

Influenced by the student and
working-class revolts of 1968, we see a second wave of centres springing up
across Europein the 1970s. Many of the voices in
the revolts of 1968 spoke out against not only the ‘rebirth’ of capitalism
post-1945 but also the revolutionary torpor of political parties claiming to
represent the working classes during this period. Political
anti-establishmentarianism was somewhat mirrored in a renaissance of culture
with political folk music and countercultural literature enjoying a wide
audience. The OSCs (Occupied Social Centres) in Italy, for example, utilised
empty buildings and public spaces as countercultural hubs in their struggle
against the state, capital and the paternalism evident within the political
left during the period.

Montagna (2006: 296) tells us that the OSC
movement was rooted in the “antagonistic juvenile social movements” of this
time in Italy. Disillusioned with ‘capitalist work’ and the socialist parties
(which they felt had been de-radicalised by their pursuit of state power)
“groups of young people started a process of ‘claiming the city’ through
widespread squatting” (Ruggiero in Montagna 2006: 297). For Mudu, the Italian
centres were part of a critical response to what was seen by many on the left
as the development of both a crude workerism within the Italian communist
movement and, supporting Montagna’s claim, “a drift towards more moderate
institutional political programmes” (Mudu 2004: 919). For the mainstream left,
the workplace and the high corridors of political power came before the sphere
of reproduction as important arenas of struggle (Katsiaficas 2006). Unsurprisingly
then, woman played a key role in challenging the paternalistic character of
workplace and institutional politics. Silvia Federici’s (2009) paper ‘The
reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the
unfinished feminist revolution’ details the extent of women’s revolt throughout
the 1970s. Autonomy centres became the conspicuous platform from which these
voices of dissent were heard outside of the private sphere.

This second wave is when we first see the
D.I.Y punk ethos establish itself within the autonomous scene. In the UK, key
political struggles for centre participants revolved around the setting up of
Claimants Unions, and organizing anti-fascist and animal liberation actions (Hodkinson
and Chatterton 2006).

The third wave: re-territorializing struggle

The late 1990s saw the much wider
alter-globalisation movement informing a third wave of autonomous centres. The
politically plural message behind terms like ‘one no, many yeses’ and the
participatory democratic tools developed in the temporary autonomous zones of
protest camps and mass mobilizations such as at the G8 summit in Seattle (1999)
and Genoa (2001) achieved within autonomous centres a degree of stability in
the streets of towns and cities.

The alter-globalization movement has,
within its ever-shifting ranks, a vast array of political opinions on display.
For example, the movement is populated with Marxist and Leninist groups as well
as International NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. To this constellation
of organizations and ideologies we can add numerous anarchist-influenced groups
(e.g. anarchist-communists and anarchist-feminists). This last group has a
longer history of association with autonomous centres but, in my experience all
the above political sensibilities are active in influencing the direction of
their particular centres.

Routledge, Cumbers and Nativel (2008)
argue that the ephemeral, transitory and to this we might add de-stratified
role (‘belonging to no class’) of the alter-globalization activist fighting on
the streets of Seattle and Genoa, defending the forests of Oregon and Ecuador,
is a position open only to a privileged few. Juris (2005) suggests that an
unintended effect of such actions is to de-territorialize struggle, positioning
it in the ‘out-of-reach’ imagined geographies of the global. For most people
struggling against capitalism, patriarchy, classism etc., the parameters of a
stratified existence places limits on their geographical horizons. The third wave of autonomous centres,
although influenced by the alter-globalization movement, is a critique of and
response to these more exclusionary practices. These autonomous centres are
firmly situated in territorial struggle – the territory in question being the
city.

A fourth wave …

Roberto Unger, writing about radical
democratic potential, noted what he understood as “an astonishing gap between
the alleged interest in alternatives and the lack of any tangible signs that
this interest is real” (Unger in Harvey 2000: 188). The presence of newly
formed autonomous centres such as those mentioned in the Guardian Article is
heartening. This fourth wave is emerging because people – whose interest in
alternatives is real – are working hard to make these alternatives visible and
accessible. Struggling against 30 years of neoliberalisation has certainly made
realizing alternatives extremely difficult. A far longer and arguably more
banal history of top-down organisational structures has exacerbated this condition.
The ability of communities to effect substantive change in their urban
environments has long been undermined and prohibited by top-down command and
control structures. Autonomous centres are important in this regard because they
give us the opportunity to collectively define our urban lives through our
active relationship in and with urban space.

References:

Chatterton, P. (2010). So What Does It Mean to be
Anti-Capitalist? Conversations with Activists from Urban Social Centres, Urban Studies, 47, 6, 1205–24

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Urban Studies is the leading interdisciplinary journal for critical urban research and issues. Since it was first published in 1964 to provide an international forum for research into the fields of urban and regional studies, the journal has expanded to encompass the increasing range of disciplines and approaches that have been brought to bear on urban and regional issues